War & Peace Quote by Abbie Hoffman

Hoffman’s genius here is the bait-and-switch: he borrows the language of militarism to sabotage militarism. “Become an internationalist” sounds like earnest 60s uplift until he snaps the reader into a new target list: not nations or “enemies,” but machines. It’s agitprop by inversion. The sentence structure marches like a manifesto, but the moral map is flipped.

The intent is less anti-technology than anti-automation of conscience. “Respect all life” isn’t a Hallmark flourish; it’s a wedge driven into the bureaucratic logic that makes harm feel impersonal. When Hoffman says “make war on machines,” he’s naming the real adversary as a system that converts human decisions into procedure: punch cards, paperwork, supply chains, HR language, surveillance, press releases. “Sterile machines of corporate death” is deliberately clinical. Sterility is the point: death that arrives without blood on anyone’s hands, delivered through distance, abstraction, and plausible deniability.

The “robots that guard them” lands as both prophecy and insult. In Hoffman’s era, it’s the riot cop, the security guard, the company man trained to obey. The robot isn’t metal; it’s a person disciplined into reflex. That’s the subtext: power doesn’t just build weapons, it builds personalities.

Context matters. Hoffman, a Yippie showman-activist, was writing in the shadow of Vietnam, corporate consolidation, and a state learning how to manage dissent with technology, PR, and policing. The line dares activists to international solidarity while warning that the most effective violence is the kind that looks like administration.